Hell is empty and all the devils are here." — William Shakespeare, The Tempest
The Sterling Estate stood at the top of the ministerial hill, and it had been designed with a single architectural purpose, which was to be admired from below.
The house was built of white coastal stone, which no other building in Caelmont could afford to be, and its grounds were lit by Rift-Core lamps that burned without smoke and without flicker.
Three fountains ran on the terrace, the hedges had been trimmed into the shape of the garrison crest, and over the entrance tonight, hanging beside the city’s own colors, was a new banner worked in gold leaf on dark silk with a single word across it.
VANCE.
Forty of the city’s most useful people had come to eat the Mayor’s food and drink the Mayor’s wine, and all of them had arrived punctually, because guild masters, garrison captains, and the Bellamy money all recognized an investment ceremony when they were invited to one.
The Vanguard Academy’s enrollment trials convened at the end of the week, and the guest of honor would be sitting on the fast-track roster before the first trumpet sounded, because the Mayor had promised it twice in his toast, once as a compliment and once as a fact.
Aldrich Vance held court at the head of the long table, seventeen years old and dressed in a suit that had cost more than a garrison guard earned in a year, with the recruiter’s bronze token polished bright at his collar.
His chestnut hair was swept back from his forehead, his warm blue eyes crinkled charmingly at every joke, and his tan was festival-deep, and the whole assembly agreed that Caelmont’s new star looked exactly the way a hero was supposed to look.
He stood and thanked the Mayor, the academy, and the city, in that careful order, and the applause that answered him was warm and sincere, because the city loved an A-rank the way it loved good weather.
The performance was flawless, and only two people in the garden could see the seam running through it.
He had checked the east window twice during his own toast, and his glass never seemed to empty no matter how often he drained it.
For five nights Vance had dreamed the same hall, the same bench, and the same boy sitting on it with his chest opened and his voice level, saying nothing worth remembering and impossible to forget, and in every version of the dream the last thing was the eyes, calm and grey and absolutely certain, finding Vance’s face in the final instant before the light swallowed the room.
He woke from it each morning with his heart knocking like a debt collector, and each day the smile had cost a little more to fund.
"You are sloshing your glass, darling," Chloe murmured under the music, without turning her head.
She stood at his arm in Bellamy teal, performing the heroine of the season to perfection, and she steadied his wrist with two cool fingers, and laughed at the correct jokes at the correct volume, and watched the Mayor’s face for cues the way a sailor watches a lighthouse.
Across the garden, an aide threaded between the tables with a folded note, and Mayor Sterling read it without his smile moving by a single muscle, which was how he read everything, and then he set down his glass and smiled more.
"Aldrich, my study," he said warmly, for the benefit of the tables. "Bring your girl, since she is family now."
The study smelled of oak polish and old money, and the Corporal waiting inside it was sweating anyway.
Ossler was a gate officer in his forties, with a uniform cut one size too small from years of sitting on a stool, and boots polished to the brightness of an apology.
His face had the texture of wet paper, his cap was wrung soft in both hands, and the whole man had the look of somebody who had sold small things for small coins for eleven years and had never before been invited to a room this high up the house.
He stood very straight and delivered it like a man reading his own sentencing.
"At six twelve, the morning after the ceremony, the outer gate archive logged an exit, my lord," he said. "Plate: Carrow, Joel. The scanner read him at Flesh-Guide, F-rank, Level 1. Hooded, with a wrapped polearm on his shoulder, alone. No stretcher, no medics, walking at a stroll.
The watch followed at discretion distance down the merchant avenue and lost him at the lip of the Rustward.
He has not touched the Carrow house since, and there has been no report of him anywhere in the upper city."
Vance’s glass stopped halfway to his mouth, and the color left his face in stages, like a tide going out.
"That is impossible," he said, and his voice cracked on the second word. "The First Stratum, he was opened up, I watched the floor take him, I..."
The Mayor’s eyes moved to him, and the sentence died of embarrassment before Sterling ever touched it.
"You have never seen this study, Corporal," the Mayor said pleasantly, and he counted coins into Ossler’s palm from an unmarked purse, and Ossler agreed with everything, including several things that had not been said, and bowed himself backward out through the service door.
The latch had barely clicked before Vance came apart.
"He knows," he hissed, pacing the carpet with his jacket undone. "He heard everything in that hall, the tonic, the glass, all of it, and now he is alive and loose in the same city as this dinner. We can fix this, we go to the garrison, my father can arrange..."
"Stop," Chloe said, and she had not sat down, and she was not looking at Vance but at the window. "He is one boy, F-rank, with no credits, no house, no class worth its name, and no friends, because we spent two years making sure he had none.
He cannot hurt you with power, so stop looking for soldiers and start thinking about where he talks, because the only weapon he owns is the story, and the story only matters if someone official hears it."
Sterling stood at the window with his rings clicking softly against the glass, and when he finally spoke, he did not raise his voice at all.
"Then no official will ever hear it, because the story dies with the boy, and the boy dies this week," he said. "You will go back to my garden, Aldrich, and you will be the golden boy until the last guest leaves, and you will drink half of what you have been drinking.
Consider the arithmetic of the alternative, both of you. Four elections sit behind my name, and it took one order to clean one flag in one archive, and I will not be audited over a Flesh-Guide. If the boy’s mouth ever finds an audience, the first names in his story are not mine."
He turned from the window and smiled at them both, wide and warm and dead behind the eyes.
"It will be handled."
Past midnight, after the last carriage had gone, the service gate opened for a different kind of guest, because the Iron Hounds always sent the man with the best manners, and of the Iron Hounds, Dagget was that man.
He was built like cargo, six and a half feet of him, with a shaved head, a face that had been broken and set by somebody working quickly, and a leather collar studded with iron and hung with tags cut from garrison badges, each tag from a soldier who had not retired.
The Hounds worked out of a dead smelting hall in the Rustward, three dozen men with no loyalty except to the paper, and their fee schedule was famous across the district for exactly two things, which were that no job was too small and no question was ever asked twice.
"One boy," Sterling said, sliding an unmarked strongbox across the table. "F-rank, support class, hooded, carries a wrapped polearm, last seen entering the Rustward.
Intercept him quietly, dispose of him quietly, and do it before the trials convene at week’s end, because the city must never find a body that can be named. Payment is half now and half on confirmation."
Dagget looked into the strongbox, and his professional opinion arrived in a voice like gravel poured down a stairwell.
"For a support-class boy?" he said. "That is the nuisance rate, and I will give you the nuisance crew. Ferro, Cask, and the new one, Renick. Fifteen, thirteen, and twelve levels, and they will have it done before the weekend. It will be quiet, because loud costs extra, and you do not strike me as a man who buys loud."
He pocketed the advance, and the strongest mercenary gang in the Rustward walked back down the ministerial hill carrying what every man among them privately rated as the easiest coin of the season, a contract to delete one academy boy with a broken class.
And three streets up the cinder slope, behind a locked door and iron shutters, the nuisance in question slept the deep and untroubled sleep of the recently renovated, with a Silver-tier halberd standing within easy reach of his hand.